This school year has been an inflection point in the movement towards banning phones during the school day. As of the 2024-2025 school year, 14 of the US’s 20 biggest school districts have either banned, or are arranging to ban, phones for part of the academic day (The Washington Post). Three states, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida have already enacted state laws banning student phone use during the school day.
Phones’ presence in classrooms have grown in the past few years. A 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that 72 percent of surveyed high school teachers in the United States identified cell phone distractions as a key problem in their classrooms (Pew Research Center). The US Surgeon General under former President Joe Biden, Vivek Murthy, publicly advocated for phone-free spaces in schools, asserting in a 2024 opinion piece that “schools should ensure that classroom learning and social time are phone-free experiences” (The New York Times).
But the pushback against phones has not been universal. Some critics claim that phones are essential in case of emergencies. Yet others, including Brian Lyman, a New Jersey police chief, contend that phones can instead hinder emergency responses (WRAL News).
Internationally, phone bans have benefitted student performance. For example, one 2016 study done by Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy found that in schools in major British cities, banning phones was associated with better student performances on exams, especially for students doing worse overall in school (Labor Economics).
Deerfield implemented its own phone ban in the fall of 2022. The policy is a full ban on phones during the academic day, instructing students to leave them in their rooms from 8:30 am to 3:00 pm. Previously, the handbook stated that, in regards to phone usage, “students are required to be present, responsive, and available to others.”
Reflecting on the past three years of this policy, Associate Head of School for Student Life Amie Creagh stated that “[the cell phone policy] has gone well” even though it “hasn’t been without its challenges.” She described the policy as an extension of four of the school’s core values: shared experiences, face-to-face interactions, connectedness and shared experiences. Ms. Creagh also added that “there is nothing that has come to light to me thus far that would lead me to reconsider [the SLO’s] approach to phones during the academic day.”
The phone policy has received mixed responses. Marco Feng ’26 noted, “I don’t understand the point of bringing your phone [during the school day]…community time is enough for you to walk around and find your friends.” However, Feng also noted his struggles with coordinating group projects without his phone: “I have had some times where not bringing my phone has quite seriously impaired my ability to participate in group projects…[my groupmates freak] out because they can’t reach me until they use email.”
When students are on their phones during the school day, they are most commonly using social media, per a 2023 Common Sense Media study (Common Sense Media). Two specific apps—TikTok and YouTube–stood out as the most commonly used social media platforms during these hours.
The recent federal ban on TikTok has sparked new conversations about its impact on phone usage in schools. A law passed by Congress and former President Biden in 2024 banned TikTok in the United States due to its refusal to sell itself to a non-Chinese company (New York Times). Congress, in passing the law, has claimed that Chinese ownership represents a risk to national security because it allows China’s government to access sensitive American user data (National Public Radio).
TikTok, in the final days before its impending ban, challenged its ban on the grounds of the first amendment permitting free speech in the US Supreme Court, but the court unanimously dismissed its case and agreed with the government’s national security argument (New York Times). TikTok initially stopped working, both in the app and online, around midnight on January 19th. After then President-elect Donald Trump stated that he would not punish companies for allowing TikTok to continue its service during his presidency that started the next day; TikTok slowly came back online on the same day it went dark (New York Times).
While the government has advocated for the TikTok ban as concerning national safety and not the impacts of social media on cell phone use, its omnipresence in classroom cell phone engagement indicates that the ban–or at least the conversations it generates–could very well change the landscape of phone usage during school.
Commenting on the conversations that the TikTok ban has generated around social media and phone usage, in addition to the recent spate of larger statewide phone bans in schools have generated, Ms. Creagh stated, “even just putting [the issue of phone usage] in the air is good for us; we need to be having conversations about how and when we use phones.” As schools continue to address the evolving role of technology in education, Creagh emphasizes that ongoing discussions about the appropriate use of cell phones remain crucial.
